“While mobile sales are on the rise, they still fall far short of their potential,” says Tammy Everts, web performance evangelist, Radware. “More than half of all time spent with online retail sites occur on a mobile device, and we’re investigating why there is such a massive gap between how much time consumers spend on mobile retail versus how much money they spend on mobile retail. Slow pages are the number one user complaint around mobile sites, ranking even higher than site crashes. Our findings are a wake-up call for online retailers to closely examine mobile web performance and optimize in anticipation of the holiday shopping season.”

Radware’s “Mobile Ecommerce Performance” study measured and tracked the performance of the top 100 U.S. retail websites (as ranked by Alexa.com) – both the full and mobile versions – across several popular mobile devices. Conducted over a over a four-week period, the study subjected the home page of each site to a series of page speed tests over 4G and Wifi networks, and calculated the median results for metrics such as load time and number of resources.

Key findings from the “2013 State of the Union: Mobile Ecommerce Performance” include:

The median page loads in 7.84 seconds (full site) – Only 2 out of 100 sites loaded in less than 4 seconds, while 20 sites took 10+ seconds to load.

The median mobile site took 4.33 seconds to load – While this was 44% faster than the full site, it falls somewhat short of mobile users’ stated load time threshold of 4 seconds.

Mobile sites are on the rise, but 1 in 5 don’t allow visitors to access the full site – 80% of companies have a mobile-specific site, up from 76% in 2012. Of these mobile sites, 79% offer a link that allows users to view the full site, while 21% do not offer full site access.

Even tablet-using shoppers get sent to the mobile site – Most sites serve the full site to the iPad, and the few don’t offer a link to the full site. However, almost one-third of sites serve the mobile site to the Android tablet, and 3% do not allow Android tablet shoppers to access the full site at all.

Android smartphones outperformed iOS* – Performance varied widely among smartphones. Median load times across the five devices tested ranged from 3.06 seconds for the Samsung Galaxy Note to 11.35 seconds for the iPhone 4.

The Android tablet outperformed the iPad* – The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 served pages 33% faster over Wifi than the iPad 2. This finding was consistent across most of the sites tested.

“The mobile web is a difficult environment for retailers to navigate,” says Everts. “Building web pages that perform well across all devices, browsers and connection types remains a significant challenge for site owners, and serving an ideal experience to all visitors is difficult. Fortunately, there are tools available that accelerate and optimize web performance, as well as automate the implementation of advanced performance best practices across multiple platforms. Site owners should consider web performance solutions that offer acceleration gains and accelerates performance for both fixed and mobile clients.”

For recommendations on best practices that site owners should consider when developing sites for today’s multi-screen universe, and/or to access the complete version of “2013 State of the Union: Mobile Ecommerce Performance,” visit: http://www.radware.com/mobile-sotu2013/